There was just enough snow today to provide an excuse to go move some of it around the driveway.

While plowing, I wondered if anyone (person or company) has provided some sort of automatic blade-lifter such that the blade will rise a bit when you back up and then resume the perfect plowing height when you move forward? This might be especially nice on a gravel driveway, where you might not want to just let the blade slide along directly on the surface.

Lacking such a facility, and getting tired of trying to reset the height correctly at each reversal, I just leave the blade in its ideal "forward" height and accept the fact that reversing would then pull back some of the snow that I had just plowed (or equivalent snow).

Some sort of big solenoid-ish thing might do the trick, perhaps, could be...

Larry - I built a cow catcher type grill for use on which ever tractor I need it . From the horizontals heavy springs can be hooked to the plow or snowthrower to give " zero " weight effect either dry or with snow residue , depending on how they are adjusted . The lift can be used more easily especially when strap is doubled over for torque advantage.

I’m not an expert, but I think returning the blade to a specific height would require a change to the lift mechanism. Either a stepper motor or actuator/motor with position encoding would be needed.

The simpler solution (assuming the margin of error/variance isn’t too great) would be to configure a timed circuit that runs the lift up when the tractor is shifted into reverse and down when it is shifted into forward. Of course stopping but not changing directions (i.e. going from forward to neutral back to forward) would run the lift the same direction twice and throw off the blade height. So maybe it raises the blade when the tractor is in a state other than forward and lowers it when it is in forward.

A better idea might be a single momentary contact switch on the dash that runs the lift in alternating direction for a specific time (kind of like the wall button for a garage door opener).